The Question of the Other Luce Irigaray; Noah Guynn Yale French Studies, No.

87, Another Look, Another Woman: Retranslations of French Feminism. (1995), pp. 7-19.
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LUCE IRIGARAY

The Question of the Other

Western philosophy, perhaps all philosophy, has been constructed around a singular subject. For centuries, no one imagined that different subjects might exist, or that man and woman in particular might be differe'nt subjects. Of course, since the end of the nineteenth century, more attention has been paid to the question of the other. The philosophical subject, henceforth more a sociological subject, became a bit less imperialist, acknowledging that identities different from his own indeed existed: children, the mad, "savages, " workers, for example. These empirical differences had to be respected; not everyone was the same, and it was important to pay a bit more attention to others and to their diversity. Yet the fundamental model of the human being remained unchanged: one, singular, solitary, historically masculine, the paradigmatic Western adult male, rational, capable. The observed diversity was thus thought of and experienced in a hierarchical manner, the many always subjugated by the one. Others were only copies of the idea of man, a potentially perfect idea, which all the more or less imperfect copies had to struggle to equal. These imperfect copies were, moreover, not defined in and of themselves, in other words, as a different subjectivity, but rather were defined in terms of an ideal subjectivity and as a function of their inadequacies with respect to that ideal: age, reason, race, culture, and so on. The model of the subject thus remained singular and the "others" represented less ideal examples, hierarchized with respect to the singular subject. This philosophical model corresponds, furthermore, to the political model of the leader considered to be the best, indeed the only one capable of governing
YFS 87, Another Look, Another Woman, ed. Huffer, 0 1995 by Yale University. 7

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citizens more or less worthy of their identity as human beings, more or less civil. This position relative to the notion of otherness no doubt explains Simone de Beauvoir's refusal to identify woman with the other. Not wanting to be "second" with respect to the masculine subject, she asks, as a principle of subjectivity, to be man's equal, to be the same as, or similar to, him. From the point of view of philosophy, that position entails a return to the singular, historically masculine, subject, and the invalidation of the possibility of a subjectivity other than man's. If de Beauvoir's critical work on the devalorization of woman as "secondary" in culture is valid on one level, her refusal to consider the question of woman as "other" represents, philosophically and even politically, a significant regression. In fact, her thinking is historically less advanced than that of certain philosophers who ponder the notion of possible relationships between two or more subjects: existential, personalist, or political philosophers. In the same way, she is not at the forefront of women's struggles to be recognized as having their own identity. Simone de Beauvoir's positive assertions represent, in my view, a theoretical and practical error, since they imply the negation of anlother (woman)[d'un[e] autrel] equal in value to that of the subject. The principal focus of my work on feminine subjectivity is, in a way, the inverse of de Beauvoir's as far as the question of the other is concerned. Instead of saying, "I do not want to be the other of the masculine subject and, in order to avoid being that other, I claim to be his equal," I say, "The question of the other has been poorly formulated in the Western tradition, for the other is always seen as the other of the same, the other of the subject itself, rather than anlother subject [un autre sujet21, irreducible to the masculine subject and sharing equivalent dignity. It all comes down to the same thing: in our tradition there has never really been an other of the philosophical subject, or, more generally, of the cultural and political subject.
The other (Of the Other Woman, the secondary title of Speculum]must be understood as a noun. In French, but also in other languages, such as Italian and English, this noun is supposed to designate man and
1. Irigaray 's original suggests several possible readings: "of an other," "of a feminine other," "of another subject," and "of another woman." [Translator's Note] 2. Irigaray's original suggests either "another subject" or "a subject which is other." [Translator's Note]

L U C E IRIGARAY

woman. With this secondary title, I wished to show that the other is, in fact, not neutral, neither gramatically, nor semantically, that it is not, or that it is no longer, possible to designate indifferently both the masculine and the feminine using the same word. This practice is current in philosophy, religion, and politics: we speak of the existence of the other, of love for the other, of anxiety about the other, etc. But we do not ask the question of who or what this other represents. This lack of precision in the notion of the other's alterity has paralyzed thoughtincluding the dialectical method-in an idealistic dream appropriated by a single (masculine) subject, in the illusion of a singular absolute, and has left religion and politics to an empiricism which fundamentally lacks ethics insofar as respect for others is concerned. In fact, if the other is not defined according to its actual reality, it is no more than another self, not a true other; it can thus be either more or less than I, and it can have either more or less than I. It can thus represent (my) absolute greatness or (my)absolute perfection, the Other: God, the Ruler, logos; it can designate the smallest or the most impoverished: children, the sick, the poor, strangers; it can name the one whom I believe to be my equal. Truly there is no other in all this, only more of the same: smaller, larger, equal to me.3

Instead of refusing to be the other gender [l'autre genre41, the other sex, what I ask is to be considered as actually adother woman [une autre], irreducible to the masculine subject. From this point of view, the secondary title of Speculum might have seemed offensive to Simone de Beauvoir: Of the Other Woman. At the time of its publication, I sent her my book in all good faith, hoping for her support in the difficulties I encountered. I never received a response, and it is only recently that I came to understand the reason for her silence. No doubt I must have offended her without wishing to. I had read the "Introduction" to The Second Sex well before I wrote Speculum, and could no longer recall what was at stake in the problematic of the other in de Beauvoir's work. Perhaps, for her part, she didn't understand that for
3. Irigaray, raime a toi. Esquisse d'une felicite duns l'histoire (Paris: Editions Grasset, 19921, 103-04. 4. The word "genre"corresponds to the English word "gender" only in the sense of grammaticalgender (anelement of the French language which cannot be translated into English), and there is no other obvious translation for Irigaray's use of the word. The words "kind," "type," "category," or "sort" do not necessarily imply gendered alterity (whether grammatical or otherwise), and the word "gender" is, strictly speaking, a mistranslation of "genre" as it is used here. I have therefore translated it in various ways according to context and have noted parenthetically wherever the word appears in the original text. [Translator'sNote]

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me my sex or my gender [genre]were in no way "second," but that sexes or genders are two, without being first or second. In my own way, and in total ignorance of their work, I pursued a problematic close to that of the American promoters of Neofeminism, a feminism that valorizes difference, one more closely related to the cultural revolution of May 1968 than to de Beauvoir's egalitarian feminism. Let's recall, briefly, what is at stake in this problematic: the exploitation of woman takes place in the difference between the genders [genres]and therefore must be resolved within difference rather than by abolishing it. In Speculum, I interpret and critique how the philosophical subject, historically masculine, has reduced all otherness to a relationship with himself-as complement, projection, flip side, instrument, nature-inside his world, his horizons. As much through Freudian texts as through the major philosophical methods of our tradition, I show how the other is always the other of the same and not an actual other. Thus my critiques of Freud all come down to a single interpretation: you (Freud)only see the sexuality, and more generally the identity, of the little girl, the adolescent girl, or woman in terms of the sexuality and identity of the little boy, the adolescent boy, or man. For example, in your view, the little girl's auto-eroticism lasts only as long as she continues to confuse her clitoris with a small penis; in other words, she imagines that she has the same sexual organ as a boy. When she discovers, through her mother, that woman doesn't have the same sexual organ as man, the little girl renounces the value of her feminine identity in order to turn toward the father, toward man, and seeks to obtain a penis by procuration. All her efforts are directed toward the conquest of the male sexual organ. Even the conceiving and engendering of a child has only a single goal: the appropriation of the penis or of the phallus; and this being the case, a male child is preferable to a female child. Thus, a marriage cannot succeed, a woman cannot become a good wife, until she gives her husband a male child. These days such a description would make many women, and even many men, laugh. But just a few years ago, barely twenty years back, a woman who directed our attention to our culture's staggering machismo was laughed at and was not allowed to teach at the university. Yet today things have not become as clear as it might seem. True, a bit of light has been shed on this subject, but, if Freudian theory is macho, it merely reproduces an existing sociocultural order: Freud, in this sense, did not invent machismo; he merely noted it. Where he goes

LUCE IRIGARAY

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wrong is in his cures: like de Beauvoir, he does not recognize the other as otherj and, albeit in different ways, they both propose that man remain the singular model of the subject, which woman must try to equal. Man and woman, through quite different strategies, must therefore become alike. This ideal conforms to that of traditional philosophy, which seeks a singular model of subjectivity, one which is historically masculine. At best, this singular model would allow for a balancing act between the one and the many, but the one remains the model which, more or less openly, controls the hierarchy of multiplicity: the singular is unique andlbut ideal, Man. Concrete singularity is only a copy of the ideal, an image. The Platonic view of the world, its notion of truth, is, in a certain sense, the inverse of day-to-day empirical reality: you believe that you are a reality, a singular truth, but you are only a relatively good copy of a perfect idea of yourself situated outside of yourself. Here too, we can't laugh too soon, for we must first ponder the still current pertinence of such a conception of the world: we are children of the flesh but also of the word, nature but also culture. Now, children of culture signifies children of the idea, incarnations that conform, more or less, to the ideal model. Often, in order to live up to this model, we mimic, imitate like children, that which we perceive to be ideal. These are all Platonic ways of being and doing, and all conform to a masculine notion of truth. Even in the reversal constituted by the privilege of the many over the one, a very current reversal often called democracy, even in the privilege of the other over the subject, of the you over the I (Iam thinking, for example, of certain works by Buber and a certain part of Levinas's work in which these privileges are perhaps more moral and theological than philosophical), we just end up with a stand-in for the model of the one and the many, of the one and the same, in which a singular subject inflects one meaning rather than another. In the same way, privileging concrete singularity over ideal singularity does not allow us to challenge the privilege of a universal category valid for all men and all women. In fact, each concrete singularity cannot decree an ideal valid for all men and all women, and, to ensure cohabitation between subjects, notably within the republic, only a minimum of universality is required. To get out from under this all-powerful model of the one and the many, we must move on to the model of the two, a two which is not a replication of the same, nor one large and the other small, but made up of two which are truly different. The paradigm of the two lies in sexual

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difference. Why there? Because it is there that two subjects exist who should not be placed in a hierarchical relationship, and because these two subjects share the common goal of preserving the human species and developing its culture, while granting respect to their differences. My first theoretical gesture was thus to extricate the two from the one, the two from the many, the other from the same, and to do so horizontally, suspending the authority of the One: of man, the father, the leader, the one god, the singular truth, etc. It involved making the other stand out from the same, refusing to be reduced to the other of the same, to the other (manor woman) of the one, not by becoming him or becoming like him, but by inventing myself as an autonomous and different subject. Clearly this gesture calls into question our entire theoretical and practical tradition, particularly Platonism, but without such a gesture we cannot speak of women's liberation, nor of an ethical behavior with respect to the other, nor of democracy. Without such a gesture, philosophy itself risks its own demise, vanquished along with other things by the use of techniques that, in the construction of the logos, undermine man's subjectivity, an easier and quicker victory if woman no longer maintains the pole of nature standing opposite to masculine techne. The existence of two subjects is probably the only thing that can bring the masculine subject back to his being, and this thanks to woman's access to her own being. To accomplish this goal, the feminine subject had to be freed from the world of man to make way for a philosophical scandal: the subject is not one, nor is it singular. Next and at the same time, this feminine subject, just barely defined, lacking outlines and edges, without norms or mediations, needed to be mapped out, in order to nourish her and ensure her becoming [son devenir].After this critical phase in my work that was addressed to a monosubjective, monosexualized, patriarchal, and phallocratic philosophy and culture, I thus attempted to define some characteristics of the feminine subject, characteristics which were necessary to affirm it as such, for fear that it might succumb once again to a lack of differentiation, that it might once again be subjugated by the singular subject. One important dimension of assisting the becoming of the feminine subject, and thus my own becoming, was to escape from a single figure of genealogical power, to maintain that "I was born of man and of woman, and that genealogical authority belongs both to man and to

woman." It was thus important to retrieve feminine genealogies from oblivion, not to repress the existence of the father pure and simple, in a kind of reversal cherished by previous philosophical methods, but to return to the reality of the two. But it's true that it takes time to locate and restore this two, and it cannot be the work of one woman only. Aside from the return to and reconcilation with genealogy, with feminine genealoges-which are still a long way off-woman, women, needed a language, images, and representations which suited themon a cultural level, even on a religious level, god being the philosophical subject's great accomplice. I began to work on this in Specdum and Ce sexe qui n'en estpas un and continued the project notably in Sexes etparentes, Le temps de la difference,and le, tu, nous.5 In those works, I discuss the particularities of the feminine world-a world different from that of man-with respect to language, with respect to the body (toage, to health, to beauty, and, of course, to maternity),with respect to work, with respect to nature and the world of culture. Two examples: I attempt to show that life's unfolding is different for woman than it is for man, since it consists for women of much more pronounced physical stages (puberty, loss of virginity, maternity, menopause) and requires a subjective becoming which is far more complex than man's. As far as work is concerned, I show that socioeconomic justice does not consist of merely putting a rule into practice-"equal work for equal payu-but consists also of respecting and valorizing women in terms of choice in the ends and means of production, professional qualifications, relationships in the workplace, social recognition of work, and SO on. In these works, I also began to speak of the necessity of rights specific to women. As I have written elsewhere, it is my opinion that women's liberation cannot progress without taking this step, as much on the level of social recognition as on the level of individual growth and communal relationships, between women and between women and men. These juridical proposals were viewed with marked interest and a certain mistrust: interest on the part of nonspecialist, nonfeminist women who understood the importance of what was at stake,
5. Several of these books exist in English language editions: Speculum of the Other Woman,trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1985);This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1993);and Ie, lb,Nous: Tbward a Culture of Difference,trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1993).Le temps de la diffbrence.Pour une rbvolution pacifique (Paris:Librairie Gtntrale Franqaise, 1989) does not exist in English. [Translator's Note]

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interest also on the part of feminists in certain countries who have long been concerned with the necessary mediation of the law in the liberation of humankind, and particularly in women's liberation. Resistance came from women of two different persuasions. Women in favor of egalitarianism do not understand the necessity of special rights for women; they agree that equal rights with men must be obtained; they are ready to struggle against discrimination; but they do not pay attention to the fact that women are forced to make specific choices in their relationships with men, and that the choices cannot remain individual or private but must be guaranteed by law: the freedom of choice in reproduction, work patterns, sexuality, the raising of minors in cases of divorce or separation, keeping in mind the context of multicultural marriages, where traditional spousal rights differ between cultures. In my view, the lack of special rights for women does not allow them to move from a state of nature to a civilized state: the majority remain nature-bodies, subservient to the State, to the Church, to father and husband, without access to the status of civilians, responsible for themselves and the community. Women who are more sensitive to a culture or politics of difference also contest the necessity of civil rights specific to women, for they fear the law as requiring servitude to the State. Yet civil rights for individual persons represent, on the contrary, a guarantee that citizens can oppose the power of the State as such; they maintain a tension between individuals and the State, and can even ensure the evolution of a statecontrolled society into a civil society, whose democratic character would be supported by people's individual rights. I can only hope that women understand and promote what is at stake in individual rights, both because these rights are essential to protect them and to affirm their identity, and because as feminine subjects, they are more ready to take an interest in rights having to do with the individual and with relationships between individuals, rather than in rights determined by assets-possessions, property, belongings-rights which make up the majority of masculine civil codes. Existing civil codes and constitutions would have to be completed by including rights for women and rights defined according to women's spirit [genie], in other words, beyond sexual specificity, for citizens (both men and women) as people. The unique character of feminine spirit [genie] also leads me back to the question of the other in this final section of my essay.

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15

Having become an autonomous subject, it is now woman's turn to situate herself with respect to the other, and the specificity of her identity allows her to pay much more attention to the dimension of alterity in the process of subjective becoming [le devenir subjectif]. Tradition dictates that woman is the guardian of love and has imposed on her the duty of loving, and of loving despite the misfortunes of love, without explaining why she must perform such a task. I certainly will not become an accomplice to this kind of imperative on the subject of love, nor to the corresponding imperative of hate which seems to me to be its complementary principle. Rather, I will pass on to you results obtained from research into the way in which little girls, adolescent girls, and women speak, and will propose an interpretation of the characteristics of feminine language.6 The language the most aware of the other is that of the little girl. She addresses herself to the other-in my research sample, to the mother-asking for her agreement concerning an activity they will do together: "Mommy, will you play with me?"; "Mommy, can I comb your hair?" In such statements, the little girl always respects the existence of two subjects, each having the right to speak. Moreover, what she suggests is an activity which involves the participation of both subjects. In this respect, the little girl might serve as a model for all men and women, including the mother, who addresses her daughter using words like these: "You'll have to put your things away if you want to watch TV"; "Pick up some milk on your way home from school." The mother gives orders to the daughter without respecting the right of both subjects to speak, and she proposes nothing that they might do together, as two [a deux].Interestingly, the mother speaks differently with a boy; she is more respectful of his identity: "Do you want me to come to your room and kiss you goodnight?" As for the little boy, he already speaks like a little leader: "I want to play with the ball"; "I want a toy car." In a way, the mother gives the little boy the you which the little girl has given her. Why does the little girl like dialogue so much? Doubtless because as a woman, born of woman, with the qualities and characteristics of a woman, including the ability to give birth, the little girl finds herself, as soon as she is born, in the position of having relationships with two subjects. This would also explain her taste for dolls onto which she
6. On this topic, see my Yaime a toi.

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projects a nostalgia for dialogue which was not always satisfied by the mother. Yet the little girl will lose this, her first, feminine partner in dialogue, in the learning of a culture in which the subject is always still masculine-he, He, they [il, 11, ils71-whether it is a linguistic category [genre linguistique] in the strict sense or various metaphors which supposedly represent human identity and its becoming [son devenir]. For all that, neither the young girl nor the adolescent girl renounces her relationship with the other: they almost always prefer a relationship with the other over a relationship with the object. Thus, when asked to give a sentence using the preposition "with" or the adverb "together," female adolescents and students, and many adult women, will respond with statements such as: "I'll go out with him tonight"; or "We'll always live together." Male subjects instead respond: "I came with my mot~rcycle"~wrote this sentence with my pencil"; or "Me "I and my guitar are good together." This difference between the statements of female and male subjects is expressed in one way or another throughout the majority of responses to a series of questions which seek to define the sexualized characteristics of language. (Theresearch was conducted in a variety of languages and cultures, mostly Romance and Anglo-Saxon.) Besides the alternation between a masculine choice of subjectobject relations and a feminine choice of subject-subject relations, there are other important characteristics of difference: women prefer the present and future tenses, contiguity, a concrete environment, relations based on difference; they prefer being with, being two [l'&tre (a) deuxs]; men, on the other hand, prefer the past tense, metaphor, abstract transposition, relationships between likes [semblables], but only through a relationship with the object, relationships between the one and the many. Men and women thus occupy different subjective configurations and different worlds. And it's not just a question of sociohistorical determination or a certain alienation of the feminine which could be done away with by making it equal to the masculine. True, women's
7. In the French language, the plural pronomial form is always masculine-even if the pronoun designates as few as one male or one masculine substantive within a group, however large, of females or feminine substantives-unless the pronoun designates an exclusively feminine category. [Translator's Note] 8. The original phrase suggests the notion of "being together with another person" and that the nature of "being" itself (existence) involves duality. [Translator's Note]

language does point to various kinds of alienation and passivity, but it also demonstrates an inherent richness which leaves nothing to be desired from men's language, in particular, a taste for intersubjectivity, which it would be a shame to abandon in favor of men's more inaccessible subject-object relations. How then can the feminine subject-starting with me-be brought to cultivate a shared experience with the other without alienation? The gesture that must be made is the same gesture I made in Speculum: we must be careful to treat the other as other. To be sure, I as woman, we as women, have a nostalgia for dialogue and for relationships, but have we come to the point that we recognize the other as other and that we address him or her accordingly?Not really, not yet. In fact, while the words of adolescent girls and women show a definite leaning toward relationships with others, at the same time there is a desire for an I-you relationship that doesn't always recognize just who the you is and what his or her own desires might be. The feminine subject thus favors a relationship with the other gender [l'autre genre], which is something that the masculine subject does not do. This preference for a masculine subject as partner-in-dialogue demonstrates on the one hand cultural alienation, but it also points to various other aspects of the feminine subject. Woman knows the other gender [l'autre genre] better than man does: she begets him within her; she mothers him from birth; she feeds him from her own body; she experiences him inside of her in the act of love. Her relationship to the transcendence of the other is, consequently, different from that experienced by man; she always remains exterior to him, is always inscribed with the mystery and ambivalence of the origin, whether maternal or paternal. Woman's relationship to man is linked more closely to shared flesh, to a sensual experience, to an immanent lived experience [un vdcu immanent], including reproduction. No doubt she experiences the alterity of the other through his strange behavior, his resistance to her dreams, to her wishes. But she must construct this transcendence within horizontality itself, in a sharing of lives which respects the other as other absolutely, extending beyond all intuitions, sensations, experiences, or knowledge which she may have of him. Her taste for dialogue could end up making the other as other into a reductive gesture if she does not construct the transcendence of the other as such, as irreducibility with respect to her: through fusion, contiguity, empathy, mime. I have tried to show how to move toward a construction of the tran-

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scendence of the other in Yaime a toi and Essere due (the Italian language editiong).I pointed out that the operation of the negative, which typically, in order to move on to a higher level in the process of the becoming of the self [devenir soi-m&me] must engage self and self in a dialectical operation, should instead engage two subjects, in order not to reduce the two to the one, the other to the same. Of course the negative is applied yet again to me, in my subjective becoming, but in this case it serves to mark the irreducibility of the other to me and not my subsuming of that exteriority into myself. Through this gesture, the subject gives up being one and singular. It respects the other, the two, in an intersubjective relation. This gesture must first of all be applied to the relationship between the genders [les genres], since gender alterity is real and enables us to rearticulate nature in relation to culture in a truer and more ethical way, thus rising above the essential flaw in our spiritual becoming that Hegel denounces when he speaks of the exile and death of Antigone in The Ph en omen 01ogy of Spirit. This historic movement from the one, singular subject to the existence of two subjects of equal worth and equal dignity seems to me to be rightly the task of women, on both a philosophical and a political level. Women, as I have already pointed out, are, more than man, destined to a relationship of two [la relation a deux], and in particular to a relationship with the other. As a result of this aspect of their subjectivity, they can expand the horizons of the one, the similar, and even of the many, and in so doing affirm that they are an other subject [sujet autre], and impose a two which is not a second. By struggling for their liberation, they imply, moreover, that they recognize the other as other, for otherwise they will only close the circle that surrounds the singular subject. Recognizing that man is other clearly constitutes an appropriate ethical task for women, but it is also a necessary step toward affirming their autonomy. Moreover, the deployment of the negative which is required to complete this task allows them to move from a natural identity to a cultural and civil one, without giving up (their)nature, since they belong to a gender [genre].From now on, the negative will intervene in all relationships with the other: in language of course (hence "j'aime a toi"),lO but also in perception through eyes
9. Essere due (Turin:Bollati Boringhieri, 1994). 10. Irigaray's modification here of je t'aime (Ilove you)transforms the "you"from a direct object into an indirect object. [Translator'sNote]

and ears, and even through touch. In Essere due, I try to define a new way to approach the other, including through the caress. To succeed in this revolutionary move from affirmation of self as other to the recognition of man as other is a gesture that also allows us to promote the recognition of all forms of others without hierarchy, privilege, or authority over them: whether it be differences in race, age, culture, or religion. Replacing the one by the two in sexual difference thus constitutes a decisive philosophical and political gesture, one which gives up a singular or plural being [l'&tre ou pluriel] in order to become a dual un being [l'ztredeux]. This is the necessary foundation for a new ontology, a new ethics, and a new politics, in which the other is recognized as other and not as the same: bigger or smaller than I, or at best my equal. -Translated by Noah Guynn